3 ms·
I live in Switzerland where everything you've mentioned has to be done thrice (3 official languages: French, German, Italian), yet I am firm in my belief that i
by born2discover 7y ago
I live in Switzerland where everything you've mentioned has to be done thrice (3 official languages: French, German, Italian), yet I am firm in my belief that it should be maintained.
It's not about whether anybody cares about a specific language anywhere outside of a province. It's about maintaining a language as one of the elements of the culture and country's identity.
If only criterion to keep or strike a language as official one was whether it's spoken by a majority or a minority, then you'd be living in a dictatorship of the masses (where majority decides for everybody else).
Learning a second or a third language is not a burden. It's an opportunity. An opportunity to immerse one self into a different culture, different world view... It should be seen as gift to widen one's perspective and not a financial burden.
And using the money as an argument against this or that is a dangerous slippery slope. Because with the same argument one could argue against a lot of other things: "Why maintain a universal healthcare, it costs too much!", "What? Maintain free education? Who needs that, it costs too much!"... And so forth, and so forth.
- kstenerud 7y agoI do agree that multiple languages are a good thing in general. I speak English, French, and Japanese fluently, and am now learning German. However, I also believe that bureaucracy should be minimized, especially at the federal level. And when it actively impedes the flow of goods and services (as it does in Canada because it's such a small market), you're throwing away far more than you gain.
- afiori 7y agoEDIT: apparently I misunderstood the problem with Canada. This comment make less sense for this particular context. I still endorse the general point. having labels in a language people can understand is not bureaucracy. Bureaucracy would be having to compile every document in both languages. A problem with multiple national languages (I have small experience of this living on the border between Germany and France and medium-short permanence in Benelux) is that if you have to write everything in two/three languages there is no space left for English to accommodate tourists. On the other hand, if there is already an translation infrastructure it can maybe be adapted to one more language more easily....